The Infosys Utilities Blog seeks to discuss and answer the industry’s burning Smart Grid questions through the commentary of the industry’s leading Smart Grid and Sustainability experts. This blogging community offers a rich source of fresh new ideas on the planning, design and implementation of solutions for the utility industry of tomorrow.

March 21, 2014

Overview : IT company need to come up with framework for oracle meter data management upgrade to its new 2.0 version .This framework will provide utilityclient a clear visibility into upgrade project ,include its scope, time and effort involved.

Meter data management : All the utilities ,whether electric ,gas or water deal with huge amount of data related to consumption of the underlying commodity .A meter data management system collects this information ,called meter data ,and perform the validation edit and estimationoperation, MDM stores and provides the data required for the downstream business processes e.g. Billing, settlement forecasting etc. .and therefore forms heart of the utility landscape. Oracle utilities MDM is one of the leading MDM systems and has large install -base across America, Europe and Asia pacific region.

Why need of upgrade: Oracle has released a new version of MDM, i.e. Oracle Utilities MDM 2.0 and therefore MDM v1.X is set to be phased out. Existing clients using MDM versions prior to 2.0 are looking to upgrade to the newer version. MDM V2.X offers plenty of benefits in terms of advanced functionality. It has a much easier navigation and user friendly GUI. MDM V2.X is completely different from V1.X as it is a completely new product all together. It has a totally new framework and would require a completely new skillset for upgrade and support. All in all it's a new re-implementation altogether if the customer decides to upgrade from the older versions to MDM 2.X.

Therefore the need for an upgrade framework which can effectively migrate maximum possible data as well as the configurations from the older version to the newer one is felt today by utilities.

•Migrating key set of data will reduce the time of implementation.

•Manual entry from old system to new, may create some data errors due to wrong entries resulting from Manual errors.

•It may be impossible to manually configure all the different sets of data manually within a short timeline.

•The effort involved may be too huge if this is performed manually.

There is a need of a tool that can be easily configured to the client system requirements which can handle migration of different categories of data and speed up the implementation.

Up grating tool will be a breather for utility those are using Oracle MDM V1.6

The objective is to develop a migration tool which can migrate data from different data categories in a reasonable time period. It should be easily customizable and maintainable considering that this could be used across multiple clients. There are Administrative, Master and Transactional data categories, each having a different functional use and expected volume of data.

ØAdministrative data is typically very low in volume but defines the setup of other application areas. Need to identify some key customizations in any typical MDM implementation which would require some admin data migration.

ØMaster data includes entities such as Service Points and Meters that define physical and financial aspects of business operations. To support the integration of MDM V2 with CC&B, tools for "Initial Sync" migration of Master Data have already been built into MDM V2.

ØTransactional data from business operations, such as meter reads, is typically very high volume; therefore a direct to database approach has to be developed to minimize migration time.